Review – Breaking the Rules – Suzanne Brockmann

21May

Most of the time by the time a series book gets to the sixteenth installment it is starting to get a bit weird. While I was glad that Breaking the Rules didn’t really run into that issue, I am also glad that the author decided to end it on a high note and not let the series go down the drain like other authors seem to have done.

As with all of SB’s previous books in the series, Breaking the Rules uses the multiple story-line approach – specifically, Izzy and Eden’s struggle with the future of their marriage; Dan Gillman (who was a royal ass in previous books) and his woo-ing of Jenny Lyn Lamae (yes, I totally agree with the fact that this would be a great stripper name…) and then the random storyline of Nisha, a girl who is the victim of human trafficking (I have noticed that this seemed to be an common theme over the last few years, and this is the third book I have read in the last three months that used it – the other 2 being Vanish by Tess Gerritsen and The Night Ferry by Michael Robotham).

One of my main complaints about the book and I might have noted this on previous ones, is that they have become much more politically minded, almost to the stage of lecturing on GLBT rights which gets to be a bit tedious. I can understand where the author is coming from, but at the same time, there is a fine line between presenting a point of view that fits a character, demonizing others who don’t share the same point of view, and lecturing your readership…it might have been more apparent to me in this one because I was listening to the audiobook – but it is something that irked me.

This is the only book in the series that I have listened to in audiobook and I felt that the narrators (Patrick Lawlor and Renee Raudman) did a good job of voicing the wide variety of characters. However, at times, Patrick would voice a female perspective and Renee a male, so that was a little bit off putting…rather than doing a switching back and forth by part – an actual identification of male/female characters might have worked better I think.

A very good ending to a long-running series (I think I started reading this when I was in college nearly over a decade ago), and I’m glad to see various loose-ends tied up. I do hope in the future, if she decides to go back and visit SEaL Team Sixteen that we get to see Jay Lopez’s story, because he is really the only other person I would love to see get their HEA.